This invention relates to a lawn mower, and is particularly concerned with a lawn mower of the type which comprises a motor-driven blade and one or more fans rotatable about a substantially vertical axis. Lawn mowers of this type include both mowers which are supported on wheels, known as "wheeled rotary mowers", and those which in operation are supported on a cushion of air, known as "hover" mowers.
The first rotary and hover mowers left the cut grass, normally in a finely divided state, on the ground. Users could then either leave the cut grass on the ground, for example as a mulch, or they could pick up the cut grass in a secondary operation. In due course attempts were made to design mowers of the rotary or hover type which picked up the grass as they went along.
A number of designs of lawn mowers have been proposed in which the cut grass is sucked up by an air stream which is either specifically created for that purpose, or, in the case of a hover mower, then forms or contributes to the formation of the air cushion on which the mower hovers.
Garden tools have also been provided which collect leaves and other debris from the lawn, and include motorized rakes and garden vacuum cleaners of various types. It is a disadvantage of these tools that they are used for only a short time during the year, in particular in Autumn when leaves are falling, and a potential purchaser may feel that this occassional use does not justify either the expense of purchasing or the need for storing a machine dedicated to this single task.
Mowers which are provided with a suction system for collecting cut grass are designed so that the aperture through which the cut grass is picked up is located in the area of the mower deck where the cut grass is principally deposited during the mowing operation. Such mowers are not suitable for the collection of leaves and other debris from lawns, which are more generally distributed about the lawn.
It has been proposed, in GB Patent Application No. 2,127,665, to attach to the mower a flexible hose which is a remote suction pick-up for grass and debris. Such a machine would be very inconvenient to handle, inasmuch as a separate control would be required for directing the nozzle mounted on the end of the flexible hose toward the debris to be collected.